SCREEN: 'OUT OF AFRICA,' STARRING MERYL STREEP

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: December 18, 1985

FROM 1913 to 1931 Karen Blixen (1885-1962), the Danish writer who was later to publish under the name of Isak Dinesen, lived in British East Africa, now Kenya, where she ran a large coffee plantation. She had originally come out to Africa to marry the Swedish-born Baron Bror Blixen, who was her cousin as well as the twin brother of Hans Blixen, the man she really loved but who had jilted her.

As man and wife, Bror and Karen were friends and occasional lovers, but Bror was an ebullient, unashamed philanderer, something that Karen seems to have accepted with equanimity until she contracted syphilis from him. They separated -Karen remaining on the farm while Bror went off to pursue his living as a great white hunter, later becoming the model for Ernest Hemingway's Robert Wilson in ''The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.''

After Bror's departure, Karen developed what seems to have been the most profound emotional attachment of her life with Denys Finch Hatton, an English Earl's younger son, a charming aristocrat who had enough money to live pretty much as he pleased. Between trips back to England, Denys led wealthy tourists on safaris, hunted on his own, dabbled in various business deals and, from time to time, visited Karen on her farm, usually arriving unannounced and staying only as long as it suited him.

They shared a love of books and music. She fed him well and he took her up in his plane to show her the face of Africa from the air.

It's this affair that provides the elusive heart of Sydney Pollack's ''Out of Africa,'' a big, physically elaborate but wispy movie that opens today at Loews State and other theaters. The screenplay was written by Kurt Luedtke, drawing on Miss Dinesen's superlative memoir, ''Out of Africa,'' and some of her other writings, as well as Judith Thurman's biography, ''Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller,'' and Errol Trzebinski's biography of Finch Hatton, ''Silence Will Speak.''

''Out of Africa'' avoids the cliches of most movies about writers. The creative process - that dramatically boring wild beast - remains safely chained up, off-screen. Further, in Meryl Streep, who here recoups any losses sustained by her performance in ''Plenty,'' the film has a Karen Blixen of such intelligence, intensity and obsessiveness that you can believe she would one day be able to write the cool, dark, bewitching prose for which she later became known.

You can also believe that she would be a most difficult woman to live with. Though almost painfully self-aware, Miss Streep's Karen, accompanied by family china, crystal and silverware, sweeps grandly into Africa as if entering a world created for her own intellectual stimulation. She's nothing if not possessive. She speaks of native servants as ''my Kikuyus.'' The plantation is ''my farm.'' The continent is ''my Africa.''

She eventually comes to understand, as Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford) tells her, that ''we're not owners here, Karen. We're just passing through.'' Yet there remains the suspicion throughout the film, as well as in her writings, that Africa exists only as she perceives it - an exotic landscape designed to test her soul.

In her books, this is, of course, true. The Africa she describes is created by her language, and we accept her vision of things - especially of faithful, childlike blacks who look on her as a great white goddess.

The real Africa, photographed so picturesquely in the movie, is more problematical. It's haunted by all of the tumultuous political events that we know were to come in the following decades. This adds a certain irony that doesn't enrich the film as often as it trivializes the peculiar narrative.

The film's Karen Blixen is part Scarlett O'Hara fighting to save Tara, part insensitive tourist marveling at the quaint customs of the local folk. None of this might matter if Karen's affair with the supposedly dashing and attractive Denys Finch Hatton made any sense, which it doesn't.

From Miss Dinesen's letters, one sometimes suspects that Denys was a creature of her own imagination, but that their ''affair'' was no less real for being a passionate fantasy. The film can't agree to this - it is, after all, supposed to be a love story. Yet the character of Denys, as written by Mr. Luedtke and played in a laid-back, contemporary American manner by Mr. Redford, is a total cipher, and a charmless one at that. It's not Mr. Redford's fault. There's no role for him to act.

There is far greater emotional rapport between Karen and Bror Blixen, beautifully played by Klaus Maria Brandauer (''Mephisto,'' ''Colonel Redl''), than there is between Karen and Denys. I'm afraid that the film's most moving moments are those that recall what life was like back in the good old days on the plantation, with Karen administering to - and being educated by - her Kikuyus, especially by a small, self-possessed, 14-year-old black boy named Joseph Thiaka, who plays her cook, Kamante.

With the exception of Miss Streep's performance, the pleasures of ''Out of Africa'' are all peripheral - David Watkin's photography, the landscapes, the shots of animal life -all of which would fit neatly into a National Geographic layout. Among the supporting actors who manage to stand out briefly against these backgrounds are Rachel Kempson, Graham Crowden, Michael Gough and Michael Kitchen, who plays Denys's best friend, another Englishman who's as shadowy a figure as Denys.

''Out of Africa,'' which has been rated PG (''Parental Guidance Suggested''), contains several explicit, animal-eat-animal shots and some mildly vulgar language. Plantation Life OUT OF AFRICA, directed and produced by Sydney Pollack; screenplay by Kurt Luedtke, based on ''Out of Africa'' and other writings by Isak Dinesen, ''Isak Dinesen: